BERLIN (AP)  The U.S. National Security Agency is able to crack protective measures on iPhones, BlackBerry and Android devices, giving it access to users' data on all major smartphones, according to a report Sunday in German news weekly Der Spiegel.

The magazine cited internal documents from the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ in which the agencies describe setting up dedicated teams for each type of phone as part of their effort to gather intelligence on potential threats such as terrorists.

The data obtained this way includes contacts, call lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information, Der Spiegel reported. The documents don't indicate that the NSA is conducting mass surveillance of phone users but rather that these techniques are used to eavesdrop on specific individuals, the magazine said.

Sorry, but the fact that this stands and does not have American citizens in an uproar tells me a lot about the state of our nation. This is the single greatest invasion of privacy and invasion of our constitutional rights in history.

2
posted on 09/08/2013 6:21:13 AM PDT
by ilgipper
(Obama is proving that very bad ideas can be wrapped up in pretty words)

This is probably the main reason, NSA, is building its massive data storage center in Utah. With millions of smart phones in the US and our allies, a lot of storage must be needed.

” The U.S. National Security Agency is able to crack protective measures on iPhones, BlackBerry and Android devices, giving it access to users’ data on all major smartphones, according to a report Sunday in German news weekly Der Spiegel.”

7
posted on 09/08/2013 6:33:22 AM PDT
by Grampa Dave
( When insane/feral Islamics are killing each other, stand back and let Allah sort them out!)

Show me where they claim to be able to do this. The NSA has done nothing intelligent when it comes to encryption. They've seeded back doors into applications and brute-forced very simple private keys, but actually decrypting RSA 1024-bit encryption is not possible with even the most advanced farms of servers. Not yet, anyway. Quantum computing is a ways off. With current hardware, even in the best case scenarios and an estimated 100,000 dual-octo core processor servers with 1TB/s fiber backplanes, it would take over 10 years to crack a properly-implemented encryption algorithm assuming large primes greater than or equal to half of the large primes used below 1024-bit encryption or greater than 75% of large primes.

11
posted on 09/08/2013 7:09:31 AM PDT
by rarestia
(It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)

You call, you write, you attend townhalls...what else can a citizen do? They are NOT listening.

Chances are that by now, the vast majority of people have heard about NSA spying. But, to the majority, it's not their problem, since, they believe that, they have nothing to hide or useful to the government.

In addition, the people running the government and making the decisions, were put into office by a coalition of the clueless and the government dependents, which in reality, is more than 50% of the population. When 43-47% of the population doesn't pay federal taxes, and when most of them need some sort of government assistance, they will be voting for the people who can continue giving them things from government. Thus, the country is doomed. The NSA spying and EPA abuses and FBI targeting of reporters and the issue of Benghazi, is all foreign to most of the people who seek big government to take care of them, and they couldn't care less about any of those issues. They care more about keeping their benefits and freebies flowing their way.

It's the "what's in it for me" mentality. They can't relate to the issues, as long as those issues don't take away their freebies and benefits.

You assertion may be true if you're talking standard commercially available hardware used on most supercomputer systems.

But the NSA has supposed worked with IBM on special dedicated computer hardware designed specifically for breaking encryption, which means custom made hardware including the processing chips. If that's the case, the NSA is many steps ahead of everyone else in breaking encryption, since by using dedicated hardware the time needed to break the encryption is vastly shorter.

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agencys use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years  and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

15
posted on 09/08/2013 7:27:54 AM PDT
by Grampa Dave
( When insane/feral Islamics are killing each other, stand back and let Allah sort them out!)

Well, i would hope the NSA has this capability, because their Chinese counterparts do. The only thing i wonder when i read this stuff is how often the NSA impersonates the Chinese & Russian state-sponsered hackers to obfuscate their cybertracks.

Once you wrap your head around the intrusion capabilities of these freaks to get past the paranoia stage, it can even be a source of entertainment. We’ve created our own redneck-based language to use in front of phones, computers, etc., and it can get quite hilarious at times. Our latest entertainment involved trying to inject the uniquely illiterate “Honey-BooBoo Family Phonics” into our own vernacular. Lol! Have you ever tried speaking a complete sentence without ever closing your lips to form the words?

17
posted on 09/08/2013 7:34:16 AM PDT
by Nita Nupress
( Use your mind, not your emotions. Refuse to be manipulated by Marxists!)

I hedge everything I say with the phrase “properly-implemented.” That means no root CAs with 10+ year expiry, no intermediate CAs with greater than 2 year expiry, no encryption hashes under 1024-bit, symmetric key generation, 45 day password change requirements with >12-character, symalphanumeric (symbols, letters, and numbers) with no repeatability, mandatory two-factor authentication (what I have and what I know), and no local key generation (all keys generated on a non-Internet-connected machine).

I’m not saying that they can’t crack it all, ever, but the amount of effort required to read my personal documents, emails, browser history, and secure transactional databases is such that they will need a really good lead to think I’m even remotely worth the effort.

Essentially, I’m hedging against someone planting incriminating data on any of my devices in the event someone or entity wants to take me down. I’m prepared to die with my complex passwords.

19
posted on 09/08/2013 7:51:22 AM PDT
by rarestia
(It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)

The government has access to the source code for cellphones and smart phones...I’m sure of this. The reason I am sure is that you must have that source code to modify a smart phone to add really strong encryption abilities to the phone. With that level of encryption the phone becomes as secure as the older STU3 secure phones. You see government officials using smart phones all the time, even the president has one. These phones are secure.

They probably forced the companies to hand over the source code :-( With the source they can write patches and put them onto your phone and make it dance to their tune.

Umm. Saying that something is quantum and it being actually quantum are not the same. Researchers MIT are still working on TRUE quantum computing. They estimate at least ten years for a serious breakthrough.

24
posted on 09/08/2013 9:59:41 AM PDT
by rarestia
(It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)

Look up Bruce Schneier’s blog. He’s an expert in cryptography and has said so much as the NSA being a govt funded group of digital bullies. They have very little actual mathematical talent at their disposal. It’s all brute force and guessing. Mathematical changes will find a way to further confound the NSA.

36
posted on 09/08/2013 12:26:40 PM PDT
by rarestia
(It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)

I once found an article (just can’t find it anymore when i need it ..) reporting that it would be possible to port a derivate of the shor algorithm with O(n^3) on these machines. On a universal quantum computer shor has only O((log n)^3)

I’ll go back to my previous postulate that while the NSA might have hardware to do it, they don’t have the right brains for it to matter. I’m not a mathematician, I’m an engineer. I know from working with mathematicians that encryption is still secure for a majority of workable solutions. The NSA is hitting low hanging fruit right now. Look at black hat for industry clues. Working for the NSA is to black hat what snitching is to criminals. It might be lucrative, but you put yourself out of the community.

38
posted on 09/08/2013 1:20:17 PM PDT
by rarestia
(It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)

You are absolutely correct/
About 5 months ago when this punk decided he didn’t want the public touring the White House I wrote a letter to him at the white house and called him a shiftless N word.
Within about thirty minutes my computer was taken over frozen and taken over with a note from the FBI stating that I’d accessed a child porn site ( which is fabrication) and they froze my computer. Scared hell out of me but it was a message sent that they will not put up with dessent.

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